Audio CD inconveniences

This has been an issue for me for a while now, but it has recently inconvenienced the princess. I spend a lot of money on audio cds and I tend to listen to my music everywhere I can. So you can imagine it being a hassle for me to keep taking the disc with me everywhere I am. What I would normally do is to convert the songs into MP3 for home & office use and stick the CD in my CD changer in the car. Besides, it’s for my own personal use and I don’t stick it on the internet for folks to copy or trade.

So you can imagine my frustrations when I bought my first copy-controlled audio CD. It would play in my car and my audio only CD players. When I stick it into my PC, it would install a custom player and the audio tracks will only play from this player. All my regular music converter applications would only see data tracks that aren’t playable. As a result, I can’t convert the audio tracks into mp3 and that sucks.

It had me stumped for a while and after some research, I learned about copy-controlled audio CDs. These CDs are marked, usually at the back of the CD, with the IFPI copy control symbol. As a result, when I buy audio CDs, I tend to look out for this and avoid them. It sucks when a CD I really want has the symbol on it. So, next time you’re at the music store and come across this symbol on a CD you’d like to buy… don’t, there’s a chance it won’t play on your player.

Anyway, as I said, it’s been an issue for a while now. But recently, when the princess bought KT Tunstall’s CD and stuck it into the CD player in her new Honda, it refused to play! I asked if there was the IFPI symbol and whether it played on an audio CD only player. True enough, it was a copy controlled disc.

I figured that it was likely due to the disc being copy controlled, as I was pretty pleased that new cars now ship with MP3 capable CD players. It made sense that the disc would be seen as a data disc rather than an audio disc by the MP3 capable player. Then the thought struck me… there must be a new copy control method out as I’ve always been able to play copy-controlled CDs on my MP3 capable DVD AV system at home.

Oh well… I guess the record companies wised up about the fact that there are now methods and applications out there that are able to overcome these copy controls. Just another escalation of the copy-control vs internet MP3 file-sharing war, if u asked me.

*shrug* If you ask me, just stay away from these copy-controlled CDs. I’ll just stick to listening to KT Tunstall when I come across it on the radio. See if I care about helping make her or her record company a little bit richer.

You know…ironically, if not for my innate stubbornness, I’d say these copy-controlled methods fail miserably in deterring mp3 file sharing. If I was a little more determined, I’d not just stop at refusing to buy the CD, instead I’d scour the net for the mp3 files instead… not that I’d do it… besides, still got no frickin' broadband in the area where I live...